Friday, August 05, 2016

Liana Heitin, assistant editor for Education Week, and co-author of the blog Curriculum Matters notes, "It's well-known there's a gender gap
within science, technology, engineering, and math majors and careers,
and a new study traces the moment many women give up on STEM to a single
college class: calculus."

Photo: Getty

The study,published in PLOS One last month,
found that women are 1.5 times more likely to drop out of the STEM
pipeline after Calculus I than men are. And that's likely because women,
when compared to men of similar capabilities, tend to start and end the
course with lower confidence in their math skills. (During the course
itself, men and women lose math confidence at about the same rate.)

"This work points to female
students' mathematical confidence entering college as a major
contributing factor to women's participation in the STEM workforce,"
write the researchers, who are from Colorado State University and San
Diego State University, "and thus more work is needed to understand the
factors (such as classroom environment, home environment, extra
curricular involvement, etc.,) that help to shape students' perceptions
of their own success before they enter college."

A Different STEM Workforce
The recent study
looked at survey results from about 5,000 college students. The
researchers asked students who switched out of STEM after Calculus I why
they made that decision. Thirty-five percent of women who previously
had intended to pursue STEM fields said they did not understand the
Calculus I material well enough to take Calculus II. Just 14 percent of men who switched out said the same.

But according to their grades, those men and women performed similarly: 16
percent of those men and 19 percent of those women reported having
gotten grades that weren't good enough to allow them to move on to
Calculus II.Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.